It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s chair and Patsy Ferran in the lead role for Tennessee Williams’ exploration of frailty and fear, A Streetcar Named Desire.   

We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.

1. Nightmare Alley

It’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.

Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.

Looking for a sparkly operatic musical, well sung and played, slick and saturated in a range of mainstream styles that stop short in the year the movie masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life was released, 1946? Then Jake Heggie’s 2016 confection may be for you. One thing’s for sure, though: it may be trying to do something different from the Capra classic, and it’s welcome to have the Bailey family as African Americans, but this isn't a patch on the rather more layered film.

If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.

This was at first sight a somewhat ordinary looking programme for the BBC Philharmonic: Beethoven, Brahms … even Stravinsky doesn’t frighten a Saturday night audience in Manchester these days. 

Whorehouses, gay prostitution and suicide – you can see why James Jones’ bestselling 1951 novel was bowdlerised by the publishers and sanitised into subtext by Hollywood for the Oscar-laden movie released a couple of years later. As the extensive list of trigger warnings at the box office suggests, we’re very much in the world of the unexpurgated original text (eventually published in 2011) for this West End revival of Stuart Brayson’s and Sir Tim Rice’s musical.

Irregular warfare has proved to be a speciality with the British armed forces. This new six-part series, based on Ben Macintyre’s 2016 book, tells the story of the chaotic birth of the Special Air Service during the war in North Africa in 1941, and it's a rollicking ride.

“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled.

After gender-flipping the National’s Malvolio, the director Simon Godwin might have been expected to be equally bold with Much Ado About Nothing at the same address. A same-sex Beatrice and Benedick romance? Dogberry in bondage gear, zonked out on poppers? True, Godwin has been free with the text, cutting freely and turning Governor Leonato into a hotel owner with a wife instead of a brother, but this production is still unexpectedly trad.